Piano Video Lesson: Why You Should Play The Piano With Your Hands Crossed

Welcome to Livingpianos.com. I'm Robert Estrin. The message today is why you should be playing the piano with your hands crossed. Now what the heck do I mean by that? Well, of course there are places in music where it's called for to cross the hands like in the first movement of the Pathétique Sonata.

You get the idea. That's Beethoven, of course. And there's lots of places in music where the hands do cross in order to accomplish a certain sound and a certain texture in the playing. But what I'm talking about today is entirely different. Now of course, you could go crazy and play hands crossed... But that's also not what I'm talking about, but I just thought I'd do that for fun to show you that it's possible to play the piano with the hands crossed. The reason for it is the physiology of our hands is just wrong for a piano playing in one fundamental way. You've got your 10 fingers and the strongest fingers are in the middle and the weakest fingers are on the ends. And yet you want to bring out the treble, you want to bring out the base and you've got these big, heavy, strong fingers, right in the middle obscuring everything.

So if you were to play the piano without compensating for this weakness, you'd end up with something like this. For example, in the second movement of Beethoven, as long as we're on a Beethoven kick, this is the second movement of the same Sonata the Pathétique. Imagine just letting your thumbs be and letting the balance come out the way they naturally would with the hands. Pretty awful because the thumbs are just really strong. So you have to learn how to lessen the thumbs and bring out top notes and the bottom notes to get a sound like this.

This is one of the most difficult aspects of playing the piano in a nutshell. Being able to balance notes when your hands are designed exactly the wrong way to accomplish it, unless you were to cross your hands as I mentioned, which presents a whole other set of problems, obviously. So I'm not recommending you do that but in a perfect world, they'd be some way of achieving that. Well, so how do you learn how to balance? Well, I have discussed this before and one terrific way is to play with different articulations and to underplay the notes that are accompaniment and to play legato the notes that are melody. So playing that same thing and playing inner voices with a gentle finger staccato teaches your hand which notes to bring out.

That's just one example by the way. You can do this with virtually any music you play. Interestingly, you don't have to restrict it to just the top line and the bottom line. When you're playing counterpoint, for example, whatever line you want to choose, you could follow it through. Not just in counterpoint, even if you're playing any kind of music at all, to have control of all the voices that I've talked about before. This is a phenomenal technique for developing the ability to bring out whatever you want within a texture in polyphony, in counterpoint in your music. Until we have some way of compensating for the fact that our hands are built backwards for the piano, this is a technique I recommend for you. I hope it's helpful and again, I get I'm Robert Estrin. This is Livingpianos.com. Your online piano resource. Thanks for all you subscribers. Ring that bell to thumbs up so more people get to see it. We'll see you next time.

Are there some fundamental fingerings that all pianists follow? Well, in a word, yes, there are some essential fingerings that all pianos must learn. For example, unlike the violin and the cello and other string instruments which do not have standard fingering for scales and arpeggios, thank goodness, on the piano there is standard fingering.

I should mention a little aside here. There is a whole other school of a tiny percentage of people, and I'd love to hear from any of you who have mastered what is called mirror fingering on the piano, which is a subject for another video in which the thumbs always play the same notes in both hands and scales and arpeggios, but that is a very small percentage of pianists.

Most pianists learn the fingering right out of Hanon 60 Selected Studies for the Virtuoso Pianist, which you can get the Hanon book on Amazon or any sheet music store. It is kind of the Bible of fingering for scales and arpeggios. Yes, all pianists must learn the correct fingering but what about your music? If you've ever had sheet music to a piece of music that has fingering in it, and then you take another edition of the same piece, you might be shocked to discover that the fingerings are different. Matter of fact, fingerings are different in all different additions so how do you know what's right?

Well, fingering is as much art as science. Not only that, consider this. My father, Morton Estrin, was a concert pianist with enormous hands. I have relatively small hands so just think of that alone, something that might lay right under somebody with big hands would be impossible for somebody with smaller hands so we must accommodate our hand size, even the thickness of the fingers and the stretch between the thumb and the other fingers, all of these things affects us.

Here's the key. You must practice and find the fingering that works for you. Now, does that mean that anything goes with fingering? Far from it. It takes many years to learn how to discover good fingering and there is no substitute for a good teacher as well as having authoritative, well-edited, fingered editions. I use that in the plural because there's nothing better than having another resource of fingering suggestions. When you're running through a problem with a passage, one of the first things to look for are new fingering solutions because sometimes the fingering, even though it seems like it should be perfectly good and maybe it's right in the score, might not work for you, do you have to discover what fingerings work for you.

There are a certain amount of standard fingerings, certain things that definitely are a must. For example, rapid repeated notes with one hand. If you try to do that with one finger, you're never going to be able to get the speed. Watch. I'll go as fast as I can using one finger on one note. That's about as fast as I can go but by using three, two, one, listen how much faster you can go. There is one thing that is certainly a rule of thumb or a rule of fingers and thumb, which is you must change fingers when playing rapid repeated notes with one hand.

In fact, I like changing fingers and repeated notes even when they're slow because of the legato quality you can get. Listen to a repeated note without changing fingers, trying to get a smoothness with no pedal. It's pretty good but, by changing fingers, one finger is going to go down while the next finger comes up so you can actually get smoother, more connected, repeated notes as you'll hear here.

There are some hard and fast rules in fingering. As I mentioned, scales and arpeggios, certainly thirds there are different fingerings but certain fingerings that are definitely better than others. If you have technical problems in a passage and you've worked and worked and you never can get it, try experimenting with new fingering, get another addition that has fingering in it and try it out and you will be rewarded.

It is one of the things that will come to you after you've studied piano for a long time. You'll start to understand fingering in a way that allows for solutions to technical and musical challenges on the piano. Thanks for all the great questions, keep them coming in here at livingpianos.com, your online piano store, with lots of videos to come. Thanks again. I'm Robert Estrin.

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